Factiva is an archive newspaper database, with full-text articles going back to the 1990s, depending on the newspaper. Search newspapers by title or country under Source and enter a specific date range under Date.

Literature Resource Centre has biographies and reviews of major Australian authors and their works, as well as essays on a range of topics by well-known authors.

Case Study

My book group is reading Susan Johnson's Life in Seven Mistakes. Can we find out why this title was used for the book?

1. This is a relatively recent publication (2008), so we could search for online reviews and interviews with the author. We can use Factiva to search for newspaper reviews.

2. We know the published date is August 2008, so we can limit the search for a year, from 1 July 2008 to 1 July 2009. This gives over twenty reviews, with some featuring interviews with the author. The following extract from an interview with Susan Johnson is from the Courier-Mail, Brisbane, 9 August 2008:

"As I went along I realised I was going to be writing a whole life virtually from birth to death in various guises with members of this family,'' Johnson says. "I started to think about the whole notion of the seven ages of man and around the idea of life as a big mistake."

(The novel has, as one of its epigraphs, the quote from Shakespeare's As You Like it: 'And one man in his time plays many parts, His act being seven ages'.)

"I had a notion very early that we all go through life and we make these choices and decisions and we're acting in a rational mode, but in fact my experience of existence is that our choices and how we live are acted out on a deeply irrational level and we don't know how we live."

These and other book review blogs have been archived by the National Library. You can search for more at Trove

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Featured resource

The Burning Library explores the lives and work of some of our greatest novelists. Alarmed by the increasingly marginal status of Australian literature in the academy, Williamson has set out to reintroduce us to those key writers whose works we may have forgotten or missed altogether. His focus is on fiction that gives pleasure, and he is ardent in defence of books that for whatever reason sit uneasily in the present moment.